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Around a halve year back I stumbled over Kaggle.com, a vital community portal of Artificial Intelligence and machine learning experts. Kaggle not only encourages people around the world to share thoughts and example data sets on popular machine learning tasks, they also host great AI challenges.

Since I joined the Kaggle community 6 month ago, I was fascinated about the individual challenges that were published. Those challenges range from predicting Mercari product prices over detecting icebergs from radar data to speech recognition tasks.

Many companies such as Google, Mercari or Zillow are hosting challenges where more than thousand of teams try to predict the best results. Often it is unbelievable how those teams solve these complex machine learning tasks.

Besides providing the challenges and the data sets necessary to wake the interest of global leaders within the machine learning and AI community, Kaggle also offers a tremendously powerful kernel execution environment. This execution environment consists of preconfigured Docker containers that were specifically designed for training models. In order to design and execute a machine learning kernel you simply edit the code online (Python, R, Notebook) and execute it within the Kaggle infrastructure.

As Kaggle docker containers are completely preconfigured you save a lot of time to download and prepare your environment.

Kaggle really pushes the AI community forward in terms of offering a flexible and open platform for executing kernels and to quickly get hands on interesting data sets. The community platform also does a pretty good job in bringing the global community together and stimulates a broader and practical discussion outside the theoretical scientific community.

Besides if you need a quick start tutorial on how to train your first neural network, grab my eBook at Amazon:

This years Ars Electronica Festival theme is the all present topic of Artificial Intelligence. The Ars Electronica Festival 2017 theme “Artificial Intelligence – The Other I.” focuses on the cultural, psychological, philosophical and spiritual aspects of AI.

As an media and art festival by definition that often uncovers the philosophical background of popular trends and hypes, this years Festival takes up the challenge of looking behind the cultural aspects of the ever-present topic of AI.

The discussion on AI, as the festival title already suggests will bring us a critical discourse on our own identity and existence.

Is AI killing our jobs and taking over many of our traditional working domains, similar to the industrial revolution in the 18th century?
How do we deal with digital personalities or with the social impact of smart machines handling many parts of our daily lives?
The Ars Electronica Festival also questions the acceptance of such super machines and if humans will ever be able to accept them?
Visit the festival in POSTCITY Linz, September 7-11, 2017.